A good example of declarative programming is ... the spreadsheet. It is not a strict example but it does give the flavor of the idea: you're telling the system about, shall we say, "the goals," and letting the programming language fill in the details of how to get there. Procedural programming, on the other hand, gives you the ability to tell the computer precisely what you want it to do from one nanosecond to the next but really nothing at all about the problem being solved.